Archive for June 24th, 2017

The 2017 Ramadan is turning out to be an unforgettable Ramadan month – with unprecedented developments both in the international and national arenas.

In Saudi Arabia, a plot to obliterate the largest Mosque in the world was blocked a day before Ramadan draws to a close.
A would-be suicide bomber who aimed to launch an attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca, was cornered in an apartment before he could attack Islam’s holiest site, with Saudi’s interior ministry revealing that three cells had planned the attack on worshippers and security forces at the mosque.

Two days earlier, Islamic State (IS) militants blew up the Grand al-Nuri Mosque of Mosul and its famous leaning minaret, as Iraqi forces seeking to expel the group from the city closed in on the site. This was where three years ago the IS leader Abu Bakr al-Bagdadi declared a self-styled “caliphate” spanning parts of Syria and Iraq.

Earlier today, Qatar dismissed a list of demands submitted by four Arab countries comprising Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Egypt which cut ties with Qatar earlier this month. The demands included shutting down the Al Jazeera Media Network, closing a Turkish military base and scaling down ties with Iran. Read the rest of this entry »

Is the Barisan Nasional strategic communications director and Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Datuk Abdul Rahman Dahlan trying to help or hurt the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak, especially on the international 1MDB money-laundering scandal, which has landed the country with the appellation of a “global kleptocracy”?

Or is Abdul Rahman so obtuse or dense that he cannot understand that his way of helping Najib is in fact a most potent way to hurt him, furnishing a life testimony of the saying “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”.

Five days after the US Department of Justice (DOJ) filed its third kleptocratic actions to forfeit a total of US$1.7 billion of 1MDB-linked assets out of US$4.5 billion 1MDB money-laundering, Abdul Rahman held a media conference to ask why the US DOJ implicated Najib’s wife, Datin Paduka Seri Rosmah Mansor when it had no plans to seize the 28 jewellery items, which included a pink diamond necklace valued at US$27.3 million?

Abdul Rahman said the insinuation of impropriety of the “wife of MO1”, implying that she had committed a wrongdoing, was unfair targeting of the Prime Minister’s wife – becoming the first person in Malaysia, in government or outside, to publicly to identify the “wife of MO1” as Datin Paduka Seri Rosmah Mansor – just as Abdul Rahman was the first person to publicly admit at a BBC interview last September that “MALAYSIAN OFFICIAL 1” (“MO1”) was none other than the Prime Minister, Najib himself. Read the rest of this entry »